Best Bets / August 6-12, 2000

Movies

Keanu Reeves quarterbacks for a bunch of unlikely guys who serve as “The Replacements” for a striking pro football team, coached by Gene Hackman. Opens wide Friday.

Pop Music

The herd instinct runs strong this week as like-minded acts gather in their pigeonholes: the B.B. King Blues Festival today at the Universal Amphitheatre, with King and Buddy Guy presiding; the rock en espan~ol Watcha Tour Friday at Universal Amphitheatre; and the extreme-headbanging Tattoo the Earth, headlined by Slayer and Slipknot, Saturday at the National Orange Show Events Center in San Bernardino.

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In a reunion of Southern California’s ‘70s pop royalty Tuesday and Wednesday at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, David Crosby and Graham Nash, with Spinal Tap (Tuesday) and Don Henley (Wednesday), raise voices and funds for a friend, ailing musical instrument dealer Fred Walecki.

Music

Guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic this week in the Hollywood Bowl is the Dutch music director of the St. Louis Symphony, Hans Vonk, who leads Beethoven’s Symphonies Nos. 3 (“Eroica”) and 6 (“Pastorale”). Tuesday his soloist is violinist Jaime Laredo in the Bruch Concerto; Thursday, Frenchman Jean-Yves Thibaudet (of the red socks) plays Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto.

Jazz

Two of the top tenor-saxophonists in the world are featured at the Hollywood Bowl this Wednesday, along with the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra. Michael Brecker has long been quite influential, while Joshua Redman continues to grow as an improviser each year. Plenty of fireworks are expected.

Art

The legendary John Gutmann chose 100 of his photographs to represent his documentary and experimental work for the survey “John Gutmann: Culture Shock,” opening Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The photographs will trace Gutmann’s career, from his native Germany to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he later settled, capturing the culture shock of immigration as well as the social change that occurred during his life. Above, “The Oracle” from 1949.

Theater

With an epic-length title to match, David Grieg’s Space Age epic “The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union” has its American premiere. Strictly for adult audiences, it’s about two quarreling Russian astronauts cosmonauts? in orbit, and their friends and lovers back on Earth. Opens today at La Jolla Playhouse’s Weiss Forum.